1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to media accelerators, and more particularly to application program interfaces (APIs) for use with media accelerators.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known to provide a software interface to interact between various aspects of a program or between various devices. This software interface is often referred to as an application program interface (API). Programmers rely on software interfaces so that they can focus on the specifics of their application rather than on the specifics of controlling a particular program or device.
Because they are designed for specific tasks, peripherals may be better at performing certain types of functions than the host processor. For example, a video card may have special purpose hardware that can copy pixels much faster than the CPU. A general software interface may not take advantage of this particular feature or may include additional layers of code that consume valuable processor cycles and time before the operation is even started on the peripheral.
One possible design for multimedia applications incorporates a host processor and a companion media processor. It is desirable to provide an application program interface for interfacing between the host processor and the companion media processor.